Making Privacy Great Again (?) – The Blackphone Story – Part 1 – Introduction

Ever since my last post I’ve been more silent than usual. The reason for it was a phone called Blackphone‍ 2 or BP2‍ , a “Private by Design” product of a company called Silent Circle‍.

What made me extremely interested in the product was the fact that in January Silent Circle started to brick phones which were not authorised for sale by them. You can read about it here.

I decided to go out and buy two units and see what they did it, and how can you bypass it.

There was one tiny problem – I’m not a mobile phone security expert, and while I can tell you as a security oriented end user that Android security sucks I couldn’t really pinpoint the elements which made it so bad. Sure, there is so many videos and guides out there that teaches you the ins-and-outs of an android system, and also discuss the security aspects of it but I decided to choose a different path. As you know (from my previous posts) I’m extremely interested in the subject of awareness, and my view is that the best path for learning is failure in a secure environment that allows you to fail. I did, for almost a month. My secure environment is my beautiful wife who allowed me to bring the phones to the bedroom, suffered heroically the sounds that came from my computer and the phone throughout many nights, and completely supported me. Most other partners would have been voting to brexit‍ me out from the bedroom to the living room until my insanity will pass.

It’s been a fascinating journey, and a painful one. I had days with zero progress, days with total setback, and days that I just wanted to smash the darn devices on the wall and get my life back. I didn’t. It reminded me how hard it is to learn something totally new, and how easy it is to make mistakes that are driven by a lack of understanding, and how easy it is to be afraid to admit it and get yourself into even bigger trouble. While it would have made much more sense to read a book or go via a training I wanted to see life is indeed so counter intuitive to our human logic.

See you soon…in part 2

Eh’den

PS

If you have good knowledge about android application security, please contact me. I still have some unanswered questions 😉